Archive of posts filed under the Fire and Fuels category.

It seems like one person’s “accountability” is another person’s “blame.” So let’s not use any inflammatory or pejorative words, and talk here civilly (no politicians in this room :)). We in the interior west must live with fire. To do so we need an “All of the Above” strategy or a “Three Legged Stool”, 1. …

It might be illustrative (and encouraging!) to look at landscape scale fuel treatment strategies that did work- when all the forces are aligned- and what it takes to get things done and the effects. It’s also interesting to take the discussion (with the same elements, prescribed fire, mechanical fuel treatments, wildfires) away from the western …

2nd Law said a while back here “Logging on the other hand, is much more likely (than wildfires) to harm watersheds, especially commercial logging that requires dragging logs and maintaining a road system.” At first when I read his comment, I thought “I wonder why he/she thinks so differently than Denver Water, Santa Fe and …

) Amongst all the whining and ranting about how the Forest Service coulda/shoulda stopped all of this summer’s fires, there is this letter to the Missoulian (Missoulian’s title above), which I’ll reprint in total: Activity on the controlled burn of the Bitterroot Range is continuing to be successful. The reports show where they are building …

We’ve talked about people who are doing fuel treatments successfully (the watershed examples here and here). But in some parts of the country, as we will see in future posts, it is really really difficult to do, for a variety of reasons we’ll explore. As folks have described to me some of the difficulties, I’ve …

Last night this graphic showed up on the national news But of large incidents, this is what we get from NIFC.. here. Could the difference be that the news story showed all fires, and the other only large fires? But then where on the NIFC website is the “all-fire” map? (Note that the source of …

As a residents of the western US, we live with fire. For the last few weeks, I’ve been living with smoke. I wanted to know where it was from.. air quality websites were not particularly helpful. I found this neat EPA app here. However, I’ve noticed that my area has smoke, but is not even …

To add to the fuel treatment debate mix.. What does the fuel issue look like in a D state when you take the FS out of the equation? (given that the reporter isn’t as cautious about his language about “to blame” for wildfires as readers of this blog would prefer). Here’s the link. While human …

The case of the Mount Graham red squirrel seems to be another example of where everyone agrees that fuel treatments make sense. According to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, loss of habitat to fire is the primary threat to this species. The draft recovery plan was revised in 2011 largely due to unanticipated …

This is a very long, and well worth reading, article by Sherry Devlin in Treesource about the Flagstaff effort, Forests to Faucets, and Feather River efforts in California. Below are couple of excerpts- feel free to post other excerpts of interest in the comments. Jonathan Kusel on why California might be different from other efforts: …

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